Contentious Politics of Mapping for (De)forestation in Indonesia: From the National to Provincial and Community Levels

Abstract

Democratization and decentralization have accelerated the dispersion of power, even in the cartography of Indonesia. Different actors from the national to the provincial and community levels have started to create maps that reflect their own purposes and interests. As far as forest and peatland areas are concerned, some maps aim to reconfirm the reality of deforestation and the opening of peatland for plantations. Others aim to reclaim the forest and peatland. Without clear and binding regulations on the mapping, a plurality of maps has prevailed at all levels in Indonesia. This is increasingly reinforced by the fact that map-based land use has become the norm of spatial planning, making the creation of a legally binding map quintessentially important for any stakeholder. The cases from the national, Riau provincial, and community levels in this chapter demonstrate that all the mapping processes have failed to create a consensus map: while pro-environment mapping is not easily accepted, the rubber-stamp mapping of illegal forest and peatland opening is no longer simply accepted as before.

2.1 Introduction

Mapping, or cartography, is political. This view has become quite common since the introduction of critical cartography by Harley (1989). Drawing on an eclectic combination of Foucault’s discourse and Derrida’s rhetoricity of texts, Harley persuasively elucidates the existence of power even in a purely scientific map. Drawing a border line on a modern map might lead to a unilateral confirmation of ownership. If that border is claimed by a state, it can become an officially sanctioned border without any involvement of the real owners of the territory or the communities living in the border area. In that sense, the transformative power of a map and the lines on it reside not in the map, but rather, as Scott (1998, pp. 87–88) says, “in the power possessed by those who deploy the perspective of that particular map,” the most powerful of which is the state. A powerholder can transform land ownership or utilization by claiming land based on the map that he created. Or, to borrow from Winichakul (1997, p. 110), a map is a model for what it purports to represent. Therefore, every state tends to monopolize map-making power and cartography is nationalized. The state guards its knowledge carefully: maps have been universally censored, kept secret, and falsified (Harley 1989, p. 12).

Recently, however, with the new governance ideas of decentralization and participation, and the development of technology such as Global Positioning System (GPS), satellite images, and drones, a movement by both local governments and communities to create locally initiated maps has emerged. Maps created by communities with the help or facilitation of academics and/or NGOs often echo the counter and participatory map movement to revise, discredit, or negate official maps by the state or to visualize the discrepancies between official maps and actual land utilization in order to achieve a bottom-up spatial justice (Peluso 1995; Radjawali et al. 2017).

This might be the common knowledge about the political history of mapping, especially in Western societies. While the Indonesian case also follows this trend in general, its mapping history naturally has its own contextual characteristics. The Indonesian state, especially under the authoritarian Suharto regime (1966–1998), monopolized the mapping power, but different ministries in Jakarta made their own authoritative maps without coordination, reflecting their own interests and the interests of Suharto cronies’ and other powerholders. The plurality of official maps weakened the authority of each map, accelerated massive land grabs by powerholders, marginalized traditional customary communities by stripping them of access to forest resources, and resulted in environmental destruction. Commencement of the democratization and decentralization era transformed this. As mapping and planning power became democratized and decentralized, bottom-up and/or participatory mapping and planning have been introduced and have played a role in countering centralized mapping and actual power. Local governments have created their own maps and planning to serve locally entrenched vested interests, while local communities and NGOs have engaged in participatory mapping to achieve environmentally conscious or traditional community-conscious mapping and planning. Today, the relationship between the reality and the map, and among different maps, has become more complex than during the Suharto period. While it was difficult to apply Scott’s (1998) understanding of mapping power even during the Suharto era, today it is far more difficult.

The politics of mapping and land grabbing are such important issues in Indonesia that numerous works have been published, including on the following: the birth and impact of “political forest” as state-designated forest (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001, 2020; Kelly and Peluso 2015), the large-scale land grabbing during the authoritarian regime (McCarthy 2000; Brockhaus et al. 2012), the One Map Policy attempt to rectify the plurality of maps (Nuhidayah et al. 2020), the consistent power of the Ministry of Forestry over land planning and management (Barr et al. 2006a; Gellert and Andiko 2015; Maryudi 2015), the changing forest planning and mapping policies (Wardojo and Masripatin 2002; Santoso 2003), how decentralized planning and local elections accelerated deforestation (Suwarno et al. 2015), the political economy of the conflicts between the central government and local governments concerning spatial planning (Setiawan et al. 2016; Setiawan et al. 2017 on Central Kalimantan; Suprapto et al. 2018 on Riau), and the positive and negative impacts of counter-mapping and participatory mapping in different areas (Pramono et al. 2006 on West Kalimantan; Widianingsih and Morrell 2007 on Solo, Central Java; Wollenberg et al. 2008 on Malinau, East Kalimantan, Radjawali et al. 2017; Dewi 2016; de Vos 2018 on Sambas, West Kalimantan; Tilley 2020).

The focus of these previous works tends to be on the dynamics of mapping at one level, whether it be national, local, or community. They therefore do not adequately elucidate the different mapping power dynamics and the various dynamic interactions between the mapping and the reality in the field. Building on these previous works, this chapter describes various mapping initiatives that are born from and carry different motivations, from the changing national mapping policies and the provincial spatial planning process to specific cases of participatory planning implementation in peatland-dominant Riau, Indonesia. In all the mapping processes at these three levels, conflict among powers and interests, and between the pros and cons of creating environmentally or peat-conscious maps, results in the absence of a consensus map at any level. This chapter argues that the lack of such a consensus map is a sign of the severity of existing conflicts and stakeholders’ rising awareness of the power of mapping. This study uses text data analysis of legal and NGO documents and online news as well as spatial data analysis of satellite and drone images.

2.2 Centralized Mapping for Deforestation

The 32-year Suharto authoritarian regime (1966 to 1998) achieved a rather high economic growth partly by exploiting the country’s natural resources, such as oil and gas, coal, and forests. This accelerated deforestation, especially on Sumatra and Kalimantan islands, and revealed a weak commitment to environmental conservation and forest-area community sustainability. Land-use planning under Suharto produced centrally driven, poorly implemented plans, and the forest estates were severely degraded during the Suharto period (Jepson et al. 2002; Wollenberg et al. 2008). According to Wollenberg et al. (2008), there were two phases of national land-use planning during the Suharto era: centralized planning through the early 1990s and limited decentralized planning by the late 1990s.

In 1967, the Suharto regime issued Basic Forest Law No.5 and embarked on a territorial strategy that designated 143 million ha, or three-quarters of the nation’s total land area, as a state “forest zone” (kawasan hutan) (Barr et al. 2006b, p. 1). As far as the “Outer Islands,” such as Sumatra and Kalimantan, were concerned, most land areas were categorized as kawasan hutan. For example, the total land area of Riau Province (Sumatra) was designated kawasan hutan. This large-scale designation aimed to bring foreign investment into the forest sector (McCarthy 2002, pp. 869–870). That is why forest land use planning came to have a significant influence on land use planning as a whole, with the Department of Forestry (or the Ministry of Forestry since 1981) becoming the sole government agency in charge of land-use planning by 1992 (Chakib 2014, pp. 14–15). The ministry was so powerful that it was referred to as “the Golden Ministry” in reference to the formal and informal incomes available to its employees (Kelly and Peluso 2015, p. 487). The main mission of the ministry was not to protect forests, but rather to utilize or exploit them. Weak concern for forest protection was clearly illustrated by the fact that of the 30,000 civil servants in the ministry, only 477 were employed in the forest protection and conservation directorate (McCarthy 2000, p. 95).¹

In 1984, at the request of the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Forestry produced a map of forest use called Consensus-Based Forest Land Use Planning (Tata Guna Hutan Kesepakatan, TGHK) (at a scale of 1:500,000). The map classified forest land according to function, as either conservation forest (hutan konservasi), protection forest (hutan lindung), production forest (hutan produksi), or convertible production forest (hutan produksi yang dapat dikonversi). Much of this designation was done with little regard for conditions on the ground, such as the existence of customary communities. For example, 96.4% of the land area of Riau Province was categorized as forest area. A few years after a new TGHK forest use map was updated and revised to a scale of 1:250,000, it became the country’s base map, despite ongoing inaccuracies and problems (Chakib 2014, p. 14; Suprapto et al. 2018, pp. 197–198).

In 1992, the Suharto regime enacted a new law on the spatial planning process to “increase efficiency of spatial utilization, spatial quality, harmony of spatial utilization with environment, harmony in regional growth, development equalization, national unity and integrity as well as social welfare” under the Coordinating Board for National Spatial Use Management (Badan Koordinasi Penataan Ruang Nasional, BKPRN) and the National Development Planning Board (Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional, BAPPENAS). The law initiated a partial decentralization of mapping power by obliging the provinces to design new spatial plans, obliging districts and cities to have their own plans in line with the provincial plans, and by giving citizens the right to be informed about the spatial plan and to participate in the planning process.

There was a synchronization process (paduserasi) between the provincial spatial policies and TGHK in order to create a spatial plan for each province (Rencana Tata Ruang Wilayah Provinsi, RTRWP).² The extent of the decentralization of spatial planning was quite limited, however. Mapping was concentrated at the provincial level, and the finalization of the integrated maps was contentious because of disharmony and incompatibility with the TGHK maps. The Ministry of Forestry largely stalled and resisted the efforts of the planning boards. Top-down mapping prevailed (Chakib 2014, p. 15; Wollenberg et al. 2008). This did not mean that the spatial plan proposed by the Ministry of Forestry was smoothly implemented, however. A number of factors hampered the implementation: (1) inaccurate and inconsistent maps, produced under various spatial planning policies; (2) poor coordination between the Ministry of Forestry and other ministers; (3) poor coordination among district, provincial, and central bodies; (4) presidential decrees that took precedence over existing plans; (5) a lack of local government capacity or will; (6) vested political and business interests; (7) a lack of financial resources; or (8) simply the lack of a plan (Wollenberg et al. 2008).

The National Coordinating Agency for Survey and Mapping (Badan Koordinasi Survei dan Pemetaan Nasional, Bakosurtanal) directly under the president was assigned the duty to coordinate the planning and implementation of a national survey and mapping, but it was too weak compared to other ministries and agencies—and Suharto’s cronies—to create an integrated spatial plan and implement it. Different official maps produced by different ministries and agencies coexisted with no coordination: Bakosurtanal had a topographical map, the Ministry of Forestry had a forestry map and a forest product utilization map, the Geographical Survey Institute had a plantation map, the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources had a map of mineral and coal concessions, and the Ministry of Labor and Immigration had a map of immigration areas. All these official maps were created with such a rough scale (of 1:250,000) that they were not practical for detailed land use planning.

The result of this top-down and uncoordinated rough mapping and spatial planning process and feeble implementation of plans was large-scale land grabbing by timber conglomerates and later by the pulp and oil palm plantation companies of Suharto’s cronies and those with strong connections to powerholders in Jakarta (Barr et al. 2006b, p. 1). Local networks of power and interests joined in the grabbing at a smaller scale (McCarthy 2002). With cross-ownership, hidden deals, and silent partnerships, ownership of forest concessions was anything but transparent. In late 1998, the Ministry of Forestry and Plantation, the successor of the Ministry of Forestry, revealed that just twelve companies controlled virtually all of Indonesia’s forest concessions, with three groups controlling more than 2 million ha each (McCarthy 2000, pp. 105–106). These actors not only controlled the concession areas on the maps, but also carried out illegal logging in areas that had not been approved by the ministry. Organized syndicates of illegal loggers had also long been active in most timber-producing provinces. By the end of the Suharto era, Indonesia had lost roughly one third of its forest cover since 1967 (Barr 2006, p. 28). The map prepared by the Ministry of Forestry had been used to suppress the customary communities’ historical entitlement to the forest to benefit the cronies.

2.2.1 One Map Policy and the Dispersion of Mapping Power

The fall of Suharto and the commencement of the democratization and decentralization era introduced new institutional rules of the politico-economic game, dispersing power from the executive to the legislative and from the national to the local levels. Mapping power has also been dispersed, with different actors initiating map making in an uncoordinated way, causing the plurality of maps to become even more severe. The most challenging issue for a democratic Indonesian government in the field of mapping and spatial planning, therefore, is to address the plurality of official maps. In 2007, a new law on spatial planning introduced more transparent and participatory bottom-up planning procedures, but that did not solve the plurality problems. Different ministries in Jakarta insist on using the maps that reflect their own vested interests. It was only in 2009 that the central government began to rectify the uncoordinated mapping and planning conditions. That year, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono promised to reduce CO₂ emissions by 26% by 2020 in the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, USA. Acknowledging the discrepancies in forest areas according to the Ministry of Forestry’s map and the Ministry of Environment’s map in a cabinet meeting in December 2010, President Yudhoyono ordered related ministries to create a base map. This marked the start of the One Map Policy in Indonesia (Karsidi 2016).

The Geospatial Information Agency (Badan Informasi Geospasial, BIG), the successor of Bakosurtanal was put in charge of the One Map Policy. After the fall of the 32-year authoritarian regime, Indonesia not only began to democratize, but also to decentralize. Local governments, especially district and city governments, were given wider authority, and began overissuing permits for plantations and concessions for mineral resources to private companies based on inaccurate maps of the permit and concession areas (Setiawan et al. 2016). Rampant issuance of permits and concessions accelerated deforestation; decentralization also accelerated illegal logging and deforestation (Smith et al. 2003; Abood et al. 2014). The hugely challenging task before BIG was to create a base map that integrated all the maps, including those used to issue local permits and concessions, into a single authoritative map.

First, BIG calculated the total area of Indonesia as 192.257 million hectares. It then overlaid the map produced by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources with maps produced by the Geographical Survey Institute, the Ministry of Forestry, and the Ministry of Labor and Immigration. In doing this, it found that the maps—and the associated authority of the entity that created each map—overlapped in a total area of 20.862 million hectares, or 11% of the total land of Indonesia. Table 2.1 details the total hectarage of mining concession and plantation permit areas on seven islands, as well as the percentage of land where authorities overlap in these areas. The table clearly demonstrates how different ministries have created maps according to their own interests without any concrete and serious coordination between the ministries.

Table 2.1 Mining concession and the plantation permit areas where authorities overlap (Karsidi 2016, p. 27)

The overall purpose of the One Map Policy is to collect and overlay 85 thematic maps created by 19 ministries and 34 provincial governments to create a base map to a scale of 1:50,000 (Sarbini et al. 2017). Recognizing the importance of one map to Indonesia’s economic development, Joko Widodo prioritized the One Map Policy by issuing Presidential Decree No. 9/2016 on the acceleration of the One Map Policy (Anwar 2018). The decree regulates that Indonesia will create a base map by 2019 with input from environmental NGOs such as WWF (World Wildlife Fund) and Wetlands International. But, the One Map Policy faces technical obstacles to the collection and management of geospatial data, such as less precise and less detailed old maps of the agencies, a lack of geospatial information and guidelines, varying technologies and capabilities at the local levels, and administrative obstacles stemming from the conflicting vertical and horizontal interests of the different layers of government and their respective agencies. Line ministries believe that land cover maps should be produced by their own ministries rather than BIG. For example, the Ministry of Forestry asserts that its knowledge of the condition and classification of the forests is based on their own groundwork, rather than that of BIG, which depends only on interpretation of data via digital information (Nuhidayah et al. 2020, pp. 381–382).

As far as peatland is concerned, the Indonesian government has created a new map for the conservation of peat. Just before the end of his presidential term, President Yudhoyono issued government regulation No. 71/2014 on the conservation and management of peat ecosystems. In 2015, his successor Jokowi was forced to demonstrate—at least superficially—his strong will to protect the forests, including peatlands, after the devastating fires that occurred in peat areas in that year. In January 2016, Jokowi merged the Ministry of Forestry and the Ministry of Environment into the new Ministry of Environment and Forestry and established the independent Peatland Restoration Agency (Badan Restorasi Gambut, BRG)³. In December 2016, he revised the above government regulation to further advance peat conservation. The new government regulation (No. 57/2016) designated the Peat Hydrological Unit (Kesatuan Hidrologi Gambut, KHG) as the unit of peat area protection and divided peat areas into two categories based on their function: conservation or cultivation. Based on this regulation, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry issued a peat map that demarcates 865 KHGs in a total area of approximately 25 million ha (with roughly half designated as conservation areas and half as cultivation areas) across Indonesia.

Unexpectedly, by mid 2019, BIG did create a base map, (which included the KHG areas) from the 85 existing maps. However, access to this map is limited to central and local government stakeholders and it was not consensually created with the acceptance of all the ministries, agencies, and local governments. This base map is just a starting point for discussion among the stakeholders and it is constantly changeable and renewable. The One Map is not a fixed map for land use planning in Indonesia and it will not invalidate existing mining concessions or plantation permits that are not in accordance with the map. BIG expects that the ministries and agencies will follow the One Map when they renew concessions and permits. But each concession or permit is valid for a long period of time; for example, coal mining concessions are valid for eight years and oil palm plantation permits for 25 years. If the Jokowi government waits for the renewal of concessions and permits, Indonesia will not have one officially sanctioned map in the coming years and the plurality of maps will not change soon. While the Ministry of Environment and Forestry strongly intends to keep the designated forest area as large as possible, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources aims to legalize mining concession areas in forest areas, and local governments are willing to create their own maps to expand non-forest areas for economic gain. In this sense, the One Map Policy that began with Yudhoyono’s CO₂ reduction pledge and accelerated under the Jokowi government might not have an immediate impact on stalling deforestation or the opening of peatland for plantations, but still, it may have a chance of becoming a scientific and political tool to stimulate an environmentally conscious discourse in the long run.

2.3 Spatial Planning to Justify Deforestation in Riau

In connection with the central government’s initiative to create one unified map, it has become essential for local governments, such as those of provinces, districts, and cities, to create spatial plans that correspond to the era of decentralization. Specifically, after the law on spatial planning was enacted in 2007, each province, district, and city was required to create its own spatial plans. Some local governments struggled to reconcile the wide gap between actual land utilization and the official maps, and with the overlap among maps produced by central government ministries and local governments (Potter and Badcock 2001; Barr et al. 2006a; Setiawan et al. 2016). The following section will examine the case of Riau.⁴ Although various actors are involved in the mapping politics at the Riau provincial level (Suprapto et al. 2018, p. 203), this chapter focuses on the Ministry of Forestry, the provincial government, and environmental NGOs because these are the main and visible actors that openly contest the legality and illegality of provincial mapping and spatial plans.

Riau Province is one of the most natural resource-rich provinces in Indonesia, with its oil resources, oil palm plantations, and acacia plantations. Therefore, it has achieved a high economic growth while accelerating environmental destruction and deforestation. Corporate interests have so dominated land utilization that the spatial mapping process has continued to reflect their interests. The two largest timber company groups, APP (Asia Pulp and Paper) and APRIL (Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Limited), have been dominant players since the Suharto period and now control more than 2 million of the 9 million ha of forest area in Riau, while 45% of APP’s and 70% of APRIL’s concessions are in peatland areas (Nugraha 2018). In addition, the number of oil palm plantation companies with tens, hundreds, and thousands of hectares has increased incessantly, especially since decentralization, making Riau the province with the largest oil palm plantation area in Indonesia (of 3.4 million ha) (Hariandja 2020).

As far as forest area is concerned, the provincial government’s standpoint is distinctly different from that of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (Sinabutar et al. 2015; Suwarno and Situmorang 2017). The discrepancy between actual forest area in Riau and the forest area on the map is stark. At the same time, the history of spatial planning revision has been an unceasing effort to legalize illegal forest use by tailoring the mapped forest to the actual forest by expanding the areas designated as non-forest and convertible production forest.⁵

Following the central government’s enactment of the spatial planning law in 1992, the Riau provincial government issued a provincial bylaw on spatial planning in 1994. The Ministry of Forestry did not approve of the bylaw, because it allocated a large portion of land as non-forest area, thus diminishing the Ministry’s power (Potter and Badcock 2001, p. 10). As explained in footnote 1, two versions of provincial spatial planning have existed ever since the failure of the synchronization effort between RTRWP and TGHK in Riau Province. That is why the term “illegal forest” in the above paragraph and in the following sentences might be a bit tricky. Following TGHK, the Ministry of Forestry and environmental NGOs viewed the opening of forest areas as illegal, while the provincial government viewed it as legal according to its own RTRWP. The National Land Agency (Badan Pertanahan Nasional) did not oppose the view of the provincial government.

Table 2.2 shows the changes in the area designated as forest land in Riau by the Ministry of Forestry from 1986 to 2016. In 1986, almost all of Riau was designated as forest land, but the post-Reformasi government kept decreasing the forest area. According to the Ministry of Forestry’s map, in 1986 non-forest area accounted for only 1.3% of the total area of the province,⁶ which was far from the actual situation in Riau. Although oil palm plantations had already illegally cleared expansive areas of forest, those areas were still categorized as forest. The provincial government requested the Ministry of Forestry to reflect the actual situation or legalize the illegal operations in the spatial plan by increasing the area designated as non-forest. The request, or demand, was partially met by the ministry after decentralization, and the non-forest area thus increased from 1.3% in 1986 to 39.8% by 2016.

Table 2.2 The changing forest and non-forest areas in Riau Province (Made et al. 2018, p. 37)

2.3.1 Legalizing Deforestation in the Decentralization Era

The first post-reformasi initiative from Riau Province to legalize illegal plantations in the spatial plan came in 2009, when the Riau provincial governor, Rusli Zainal, decided to revise the unapproved 1994 spatial plan and requested the Ministry of Forestry to change the status of previously designated forest areas to non-forest, or to “de-forest.” In 2011, the Ministry of Forestry decided to deforest around 1.75 million ha in Riau Province. In 2012, Rusli requested the Ministry of Forestry to de-forest a further 3.5 million ha of forest area. Faced with the governor’s request, the Ministry of Forestry created an integrated team comprised of bureaucrats from related ministries, professors, Riau provincial bureaucrats, and logging company association representative to evaluate the governor’s request and make a recommendation in 2009. After receiving revised provincial requests three times, the team recommended to de-forest around 2.7 million of the requested 3.5 million ha (Tim Terpadu RTRWP Riau 2012; Jikalahari 2018, pp. 16–17). However, the Ministry of Forestry did not follow this recommendation from the team, and instead issued a decision to de-forest 1.62 million ha in 2014. The environmental NGO network, Jikalahari found that this decision legalized the status of approximately 77,000 ha of plantations operated by 104 of the 378 illegally operating oil palm enterprises in the province (Fitria 2017a).⁷

Not satisfied with the Ministry of Forestry’s 2014 decision, the provincial government demanded more illegally operating plantations in forest areas be legalized. In 2015, the provincial governor appealed to the National Ombudsman of Indonesia for possible abuse of authority by the Ministry of Forestry, which had ignored the team’s recommendation and had “caused legal uncertainty to deliver the public service.” The Ombudsman issued a recommendation to the Ministry of Forestry to revise its decision in order to expand the non-forest area for residential areas, business and government areas, defense infrastructure and facilities, and the development needs of the national and local interests. It also suggested creating a “holding zone” (or an area the spatial utilization of which has not been decided yet: kawasan yang belum ditetapkan perubahan peruntukan ruangnya) for the area which was still designated as forest area according to the ministry’s decision but was no longer in the forest area according to the team’s recommendation.

Following the Ombudsman’s recommendation, the Minister of Forestry issued a new decision in 2016 that de-forested around 90,000 ha of land. Again, this amount was far less than the provincial government’s request, and so in 2016 it submitted a draft bylaw on provincial spatial planning to the provincial parliament, aiming to deforest a further million ha of forest area. If accepted, the proposed bylaw would change the status of the oil palm plantation areas of 32 companies from illegally grabbed forest areas to non-forest areas.

The provincial government and parliament agreed that the lack of spatial planning had caused an investment slump in Riau. After receiving the draft bylaw on spatial planning, the parliament immediately set up a special committee to analyze its relevance in September 2016, aiming to pass the bill in one month (Rozi 2016). The committee realized that converting a forest area into a non-forest area was legally impossible without permission to release a forest area (izin pelepasan kawasan hutan) from the Minister of Forestry. It determined that this legal problem would be solved by following the Ombudsman’s recommendation to create a “holding zone” for approximately 406,000 of the one million ha of the provincial government-proposed non-forest area. The committee decided to exclude roughly 600,000 ha from the holding zone because these areas were under the control of large companies without permission. On the other hand, the ex-head of the committee justified the creation of the holding zone for 406,000 ha to protect the customary communities (masyarakat adat) who had lived in the forest areas for years (see Binawan and Osawa, Chap. 10,) and to develop national strategic projects, such as toll roads and dams (Bertuahpos 2018). The bylaw regulated that approximately 322,000 ha of the holding zone was designated as “peoples’ farms” (perkebunan rakyat). The parliament approved the committee’s draft bylaw and enacted it in September 2017.

2.3.2 Counter-Mapping in Riau and the Persistent Deforestation Process

The bylaw was filled with irregularities and ambiguities, however. First, the justification to create the 406,000 ha-holding zone turned out to be misleading at best, or outright false. Environmental NGOs, including Eyes on the Forest and Jikalahari, used portable GPS units to conduct a field investigation, or counter-mapping, of 12% of the 32,000 ha designated as peoples’ farms in the holding zone. They found, and mapped, that these areas were not for small farmers, but rather for four oil palm plantation companies, 10 businessmen, and three cooperatives in partnership with the plantation companies, each holding 50 to 12,000 ha of land (Fitria 2017b; Eyes on the Forest 2018).

The province’s spatial planning did not consider the existence of customary community land at all and, for the most part, neglected the central government policy to protect the peat forest. As mentioned earlier, the Jokowi government established BRG and issued the regulation to protect 865 KHGs comprised of 25 million ha (with 50% designated as conservation area and 50% as cultivation area). The regulation stipulates that Riau Province has approximately 5 million ha of peat ecosystem, with 2.47 million ha designated as a conservation area and 2.57 million ha designated as a cultivation area. But the newly passed provincial spatial planning bylaw only designated approximately 22,000 ha as a peat conservation area. This was less than 1% of the peat conservation area designated in the central government’s regulation No. 57/2014.

Another complicated issue is the term “holding zone” itself. The provincial government used the term to refer to forest areas with no clear land-use objective based on Presidential Instruction No. 8/2003. The instruction regulates that the provincial governor can propose to the Minister of Forestry to designate a forest area that the province is requesting to change the status of, but to which the Ministry has not yet agreed, as a “holding zone.” This means that the status of a holding zone is, by definition, legally ambiguous. This ambiguity may be the reason why the provincial government later stopped using the term “holding zone” and started to use the term “outline” instead to refer to the same 406,000 ha of forest area. The provincial bylaw unilaterally defines the term “outline” as the border delineating currently designated forest areas that are planned to be developed for uses other than forest. If we follow this definition, the “outline” area has a clear land-use objective other than forest use. The problem is that the provincial government’s justification for changing the term from holding zone to outline is based on a 2017 decision of the Ministry of Home Affairs, which was made to follow Government Regulation No. 8/2013. Strangely, neither the ministry’s decision nor the government regulation mentions the term “outline” at all. The term outline, therefore, has no legal foundation, making it legally unjustifiable for the provincial government to utilize the “outline” forest area for non-forest needs without the approval of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.

After the Riau provincial government submitted its spatial planning bylaw to the Ministry of Home Affairs in October 2017, the Ministry, together with the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, BIG, BAPPENAS, and the Ministry of Agrarian and Spatial Planning, evaluated the bylaw. In its evaluation report in November 2017, the Ministry of Home Affairs requested the provincial government to revise 26 points in the bylaw and conduct a kind of environmental assessment called a strategic study on the environment (kajian lingkungan hidup strategis, KLHS) and to submit the KLHS to the Ministry of Environment and Forest.⁸ The Ministry of Home Affairs, BIG, BAPPENAS and the Ministry of Agrarian and Spatial Planning soon agreed with the revised bylaw, but the Ministry of Environment and Forest was not satisfied with the KLHS submitted by the provincial government. The main reason for the Ministry’s rejection of the KLHS was the discrepancy between the ministry’s and the provincial government’s designated forest and peat conservation areas (Yugo 2018a; Suparto 2019, pp. 91–92).

The Ministry of Environment and Forest requested a further revision of the KLHS to be submitted within a year, by April 2018. Strangely, when the provincial government secretary requested the Ministry of Home Affairs to issue a registration number for the spatial planning bylaw without submitting the KLHS to the Ministry of Environment and Forest, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued the registration number for the bylaw—thus approving it—in late April (Yugo 2018b). The acting provincial governor and parliament greeted this issuance with excited expectation of an influx of investment to the province. The provincial government’s division head of investment and integrated service predicted that 53 trillion Rupiah from 171 domestic companies and 160 foreign companies would be invested, mainly in the plantation and hotel sectors, following the issuance of the spatial planning bylaw (Advertorial DPRD Provinsi Riau 2018; Analisadaily 2018).

After the provincial government and parliament enacted Bylaw No. 10/2018 in May 2018, environmental NGOs in Riau harshly criticized the spatial planning process for being full of irregularities, including the unfinished revision of the KLHS (Jikalahari 2018). Jikalahari and Walhi submitted a constitutional complaint on the bylaw to the Supreme Court (Mahkamah Agung) in August 2019 (Fitria 2019). Two months later, the court decided in favor of the plaintiffs, ruling that some articles of the bylaw were unconstitutional and issuing a correction order to the provincial government, including cancelling the use of the term “outline,” nullifying the province’s unilateral decision to open forest areas for non-forestry use, and ordering the province not to ignore the central government’s peat restoration policy (Mahkamah Agung 2019).

This lawsuit—and victory—of the environmental NGOs indicates that civil society counter mapping may be able to successfully contain the spatial justification of the deforestation process by the local government and business actors. But it is doubtful if the provincial government will simply follow the court’s decision and invalidate all the permits of the illegally operating plantation companies. The illegal plantations are too dominant to neglect. A survey conducted by Eyes on the Forest in 2019 reveals that 47% of oil palm plantations are in the forest area and 39% of plantations outside the forest area do not have business permits, meaning that only 14% of oil palm plantations Riau are operating legally outside the forest (Eyes on the Forest 2021, p. 1).⁹

After becoming provincial governor in 2019, Syamsuar established a special taskforce to tackle the problem of illegal oil palm plantations in August of that year, boasting that the government would take measures against 1.2 million ha of illegal plantations. By January 2020, the taskforce had identified around 80,000 ha of illegal plantations and found 32 plantation companies with around 58,000 ha of illegally owned plantations, but no measures have been implemented (Tim Publikasi Katadata 2020; Fitria 2021). At the same time, the provincial government is distorting the court’s correction order by proposing a status quo plan in which the deforested area in the outline/holding zone is kept as it is until the long-term land contracts for logging and plantations in the zone expire (Dewi 2021; Gunawan 2021).

The Riau case illustrates that the central government is far from monolithic, and different stakeholders at the national and local levels are aggressively engaged in the official mapping and counter-mapping process. The provincial governor and parliament have prioritized economic development through the opening of land for plantations and pressured the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to accept the province’s own version of a spatial map that legalizes the illegally opened forest area, and the Ombudsman has supported the provincial government’s stance. But, environmental NGOs have successfully used counter-mapping to problematize the pro-plantation provincial mapping process and appealed to the court, winning a lawsuit. This may mean that democratization and decentralization have produced a dynamic mapping process and the environmental NGOs’ counter mapping and legal strategy have borne fruit, at least for the moment. This dynamism will not end soon, however, and pro-plantation actors both at the national and provincial levels will have other strategies to assert their deforestation will.¹⁰

2.4 Participatory Mapping at the Village Level

The provincial spatial planning process was tarred by the strong economic motivation of the local government and business sector to legalize deforestation, but the deforestation drive has not simply prevailed. This is because a counter drive has been taking place at the community level to engage in a bottom-up mapping process.

The bottom-up mapping movement to break up the state’s monopolistic mapping power began in Canada in the 1970s. The importance of bottom-up mapping was realized for the first time in Indonesia in 1990, during the final days of the Suharto authoritarian regime. Decentralization and democratization, and access to cheaper surveying and mapping technology, such as portable GPS trackers and drones, accelerated the bottom-up and participatory, or counter, mapping movement across Indonesia to reclaim customary land that the Suharto regime forcefully plundered, promote environmental justice (Radjawali et al. 2017), and to define village borders.

In 2017, of the 83,172 desa (villages) and kelurahan (the smallest administrative unit in an urban area) in Indonesia, only 14.6% had definitive borders. Realizing the need for definitive borders and to end border conflicts in order to accelerate village development, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued a ministerial decree on village borders in 2006. Furthermore, the central government, after strong pressure from villages, enacted a law on villages in 2014 that clarified village authority and drastically increased village budgets. The law obligates each village to create an annual and a mid-term development plan, including a spatial one. Such a plan requires a clearly defined village area and, therefore, in 2016 the Ministry of Home Affairs revised the above ministerial decree in order to accelerate the determination of borders with the support of NGOs. Even though some local governments have started to adopt the participatory mapping method at the village level, the central government has not officially acknowledged a participatory map, maintaining that the accuracy of the maps created by GPS trackers is not high enough and the participatory mapping actors have no qualification as surveyors. But these maps become a reference for future official map making.

In view of these various developments, the authors of this chapter conducted a participatory mapping case study to determine the borders and clarify land utilization in a village in Riau Province. The process utilized satellite maps, GIS trackers, and drones, and was conducted in collaboration with a local NGO called Hakiki and the Pelalawan District government under the Future Earth Trans-disciplinary Project called “Building a Sustainable Governance of Smallholders’ Oil Palm Plantations in Indonesia.” The purpose of the mapping was to incubate a spatial discussion platform for the villagers to think about the future possibility of village development that is not totally dependent on oil palm plantations. As Chap. 10 by Binawan and Osawa elucidate, the lack or ambiguity of village borders in Riau Province have created the disincentive to have an idea or vision to empower the village as a unit and also opened more space for companies and businessmen to establish oil palm plantations illegally in forest and peat areas.

After discussion with the Institute for Research and Community Service (Lembaga Penelitian dan Pengabdian kepada Masyarakat, LPPM) of Riau University and the Pelalawan District government, we chose Village M in Pelalawan District as the research site. The village is approximately 100 km southwest of Pekanbaru, the capital of Riau Province, as shown in Fig. 2.1. The village head welcomed our idea to create a detailed village map for the future village plan partly because the village had no clear borders with neighboring villages and it needed a village map for the mid-term development plan, as mentioned above. With the consent of the district government, we agreed to conduct a participatory mapping process by involving the villagers.

Fig. 2.1

Village M in Riau Province

The village is divided into six hamlets (RW). Four of these, RW1, 2, 3, and 6, are located in a peat swamp area (see Fig. 2.2), and two, RW4 and 5, are located in a hilly area with extensive mineral soil. Previously, the peatland was intractable and foreign, even to those living near peatland areas. Villagers sometimes extracted timber and non-timber products from the peatlands, but they did not use the peatland as they did the mineral soils (see also Osawa, Chap. 6). Peatlands emerged as a last frontier of Riau Province for oil palm plantations especially in the late 1990s. Since then, those with capital have been investing massive amounts of money to convert peatlands into plantations. As mentioned in the previous sections, plantations were established not only in non-forest peatlands, but also illegally in forest peatlands. In 2015, due to the El Niño phenomenon, large scale fires in peat swamps in Sumatra and Kalimantan caused serious smoke pollution in neighboring countries.

Fig. 2.2

Ownership ratio in RW 1, 2, and 6

We can clearly see the land grabbing of peatlands occurring at the micro-level of M Village. This began around 2000, and the conversion to oil palm plantations proceeded rapidly. These lands were developed by people with capital from outside the village. But this does not simply mean that there is a sharp discrepancy or dichotomy between poor villagers and land-holding outsiders, because village-scale land grabbing was carried out in collaboration with the village officers. In the case of M Village, some villagers themselves helped outsiders grab peatland for their economic benefit. Although land grabbing in the peatland frontier brought some formal and informal money to the village officers and common villagers, that land grab also resulted in serious peat fires and damage to the villagers themselves. Ironically, outsiders and “insiders” are in a complicit relationship when it comes to the peat fire calamities.

2.4.1 Village Boundary Determination

The first step in the mapping process was to determine the village and RW borders. Based on the WorldView satellite image taken on April 2, 2015 with a ground resolution of 50 cm, we interviewed village leaders, neighborhood leaders, and other influential people, as well as ordinary residents, from February 2016 to get a general idea of the village boundaries. Our experience has shown that it is not easy for residents who are not used to looking at maps to identify the actual location from the map, but when looking at high-resolution satellite imagery, most residents are able to recognize their houses, cultivated land, and landmark facilities, structures, and trees in the village. In this process, we found that most of the residents could recognize their houses, farmland, landmark facilities, and specific structures and trees. Satellite images taken within a year of the interviews were enlarged and printed on A0-sized sheet of paper for the residents to see, which enabled them to get a rough idea of the village boundaries. In addition, we went around the village with a GPS device with the residents to confirm the coordinates of the boundaries.

No major problems were encountered in determining either the RW borders or the village’s boundaries with neighboring villages.¹¹ Following confirmation with officials from the neighboring villages, we were able to draw up a village boundary map as shown in Fig. 2.3, which delineates the boundaries of each village and each RW. Based on this village boundary map, the area of each hamlet from RW1 to RW6 was calculated to be 1436 ha, 1106 ha, 3388 ha, 676 ha, 2401 ha, and 581 ha, respectively, for a total village area of 9588 ha.

Fig. 2.3

Village and RW borders in M village

2.4.2 Visualizing Land Ownership in Peatlands

Once the boundaries of the village and its hamlets had been demarcated, we attempted to determine the status of the ownership and use of the peatlands that were spread across the hamlets. The exact distribution of peatlands in the village is difficult to ascertain. However, we know from interviews with local residents that the peatland was not yet cleared in the early 2000s, so we extracted the forest area between the river and the village from the LANDSAT satellite image taken on August 15, 2002 and assumed that this area was peatland. Since this study was a pilot study and the survey period and budget were limited, the survey area was limited to the entire area of RW2 and RW6 and the northeastern part of RW1. We followed the same survey method that we used to identify the boundaries of the hamlets and the village: interviews with residents based on satellite imagery and a field survey.

Figures 2.2 and 2.4 show that most of the peatland in each hamlet is not owned by the residents, but by outsiders. In RW1, for example, 221 ha of land is owned by outsiders, while only 39 ha is owned by RW1 residents. In RW2, the amount of land owned by outsiders and residents was 120 ha and 24 ha, respectively, and in RW6, 113 ha and 14 ha, respectively. We also found that almost all of the land owned by outsiders was used for oil palm plantations. Of these, the largest area was owned by a company with an address in Pekanbaru, which occupied 175 hectares, or 70% of the peatland area in RW2.

Fig. 2.4

Land ownership in RW 1, 2, and 6 in M village

Although the above situation was well known among the local residents, there was no spatial and quantitative information on the situation. The visualization of the realities of land use and ownership in the village resulted in the stagnation of the mapping process.

2.4.3 Revealing the Political Nature of Maps

Because Hakiki had a trusting relationship with the local government secretary of Pelalawan District and we had formed a friendly relationship with the M Village head, we were able to establish the boundaries with neighboring villages and between the RWs relatively smoothly using satellite imagery and drones. However, as the land ownership of the peat swamp became clearer, it became more difficult to continue the survey, as the map showed that the peat swamp was owned by people outside the village even though it was in the forest conservation area. Not only did it show that government officials had illegally given permission for development, but it also revealed that some of the outsiders were locally influential actors.

As this case illustrates, bottom-up or participatory mapping is not a panacea. Even if it is a bottom-up approach, no map can be made without taking into consideration the hierarchical relationships that exist in villages and/or customary communities. The voices of formal and informal leaders may prevail. If a map is made solely by marginalized people and the NGOs supporting them, it will take a long time for that map to be recognized and legitimized, and if the map is simply exposed to the villagers, it may cause more visible, serious, and violent conflicts within the community. In the case of M Village, the village boundary could be smoothly fixed on the map after consultation with the neighboring villages. The problem arose when clarifying the land ownership within the village boundaries. The village head, who had agreed to create a village map, had not really thought through the implications of mapping power. He did not anticipate that the bottom-up mapping process would reveal information on land (legal and illegal) borrowing and selling, which had been decided only by a small elite of the village. Some villagers were involved in opening the peatland opening for outsiders and knew the actual status of peatland utilization, but the socio-political impact would be significant once it was visible as a map, which is what the village head was understandably afraid of. The participatory mapping process at the village level therefore resulted in a halfway map with no village recognition. In the process, however, the village head recognized 1000 ha of natural forest as village communal land and promised to protect it. The map, which includes the pledge-protected communal land, now exists and it can be utilized at any time in the future.

A similar stagnation tends to happen during the map-making process in larger villages outside of Java and Bali in Indonesia, where outsiders complicit with village officials illegally open peatland areas for oil palm plantations, sometimes with the involvement of villagers. The problem here is the definition, or meaning, of illegality. Establishing a plantation in a peat area within the state forest is illegal because it is against the forestry regulations. But illegality in this sense is too common in Indonesia, as 3.4 million ha of oil palm plantations, or around 20% of some 16.8 million ha of total oil palm cover in Indonesia, is located inside the forest zone. Approximately 1.2 million ha of smallholder plantations are also inside the forest zone (Fakultas Kehutanan UGM 2018; Bakhtiar et al. 2019). Simply reversing all the “illegal” plantations to the forest is unworkable, but simply legalizing all the “illegal” plantations will only further accelerate the deforestation. Here emerges ideas to incorporate the social forestry scheme under the Jokowi government and to introduce an agroforestry model of oil palm plantations mixed with other tree crops (Sumardjono et al. 2018; Bakhtiar et al. 2019). If the central government is forced to address this issue with a clear-cut policy, then currently unrecognized maps, such as the one we created in M Village, might be meaningful for future village plans.

2.5 Conclusion

Mapping is a political act. During the Suharto authoritarian regime, the mapping power held by the central government was significant, but not fully centralized in one institution, such as the Ministry of Forestry. Different ministries produced and used different maps for their own interests with weak coordination among them. They imposed these maps without considering the real life of the communities or the negative environmental impacts of doing so. The maps preceded, transformed, and corrupted the reality. Different actors claimed specific territories as concession, plantation, conservation, or other areas, using different “official” maps to advance their interests. Maps thus served the interests of central government and related corporate actors. In turn, then, these vested interests preceded, transformed, or corrupted the “official” maps.

The fall of the Suharto regime and the emergence of new technology have expanded the political opportunity structure for local actors to counter centrally decided mapping. The deconstruction, democratization, and decentralization of mapping power is underway. The One Map Policy launched by Yudhoyono and continued by Joko Widodo is an ambitious endeavor to consolidate all centrally defined and locally created maps into a single authentic and official base map to a scale of 1:50,000. Although BIG created a base map in 2019 to rectify the plurality of “official” maps, it has not been accepted by all the stakeholders as a “One Map.” As far as forest and peatland areas are concerned, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry and BRG, or its successor agency, BRGM (see footnote 3), aim to keep the forest area as large as possible by promoting forest conservation as a means to stop global warming. At the same time, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, and local governments prioritize plantations and natural resource exploitation, demanding the expansion of non-forest areas. It is hard to imagine that these agencies will reach any consensus on one base map any time soon. The creation of one map itself can be, however, at least one small but important step toward an environment-conscious discourse prevailing.

The politicization of mapping is also quite clear in Riau Province’s spatial planning and M Village’s map-making processes. Still today, Riau Province has had no spatial planning because of the lingering conflicts among various stakeholders. On the one hand, the provincial governor and parliament have consistently promoted expansion of the deforested area in the spatial plan and have received a certain level of support from the central independent organization of the Ombudsman. On the other hand, local environmental NGOs have used counter-mapping to problematize the process of legalizing illegal plantations and to illustrate the destructive nature of deforestation and peat fires. These NGOs have sometimes succeeded in obtaining the support of Jakarta stakeholders, such as the Supreme Court. The M Village participatory mapping process—in which and environmental NGO used GPS devices and drones—was quite successful in determining the village borders and in obtaining a pledge to conserve communal land. The process stagnated, however, when it came to visualizing peatland utilization. The mapping process clearly revealed the disproportionate ownership of peatlands by outsiders and thus had the potential to invoke villager anger. The local NGO found it difficult to continue creating the map against the will of village elite, who supported the status quo. This process demonstrates the emerging awareness of the political power of mapping at the village level. Although the M Village map (and others like it) currently remains unfinished, it can be used in the future.

As these mapping and spatial planning processes, and the actual land grabbing history, show, democratization, decentralization, and the introduction of IT have precipitated an important dispersion of mapping power, empowering the spatial justice movement. While the actors supporting pro-plantation mapping are powerful at every level, there is still a chance to achieve spatial justice and a more sustainable environment by combining mapping and judiciary powers in Indonesia.